Blind Man With a Pistol (25 page)

     
The detectives became alert.

     
"You West Indian?" Grave Digger was quick to ask.

     
"Yes, I was born in the hills behind Kingston."

     
"You know many West Indians here?"

     
"Noooo, I don't have any reason to see any."

     
"Was John?"

     
"John! Oh, no, he was from Alabama."

     
"You know voodoo?"

     
"I'm from Jamaica? Voodoo is serious."

     
"I believe you," Grave Digger said.

     
"Tell us why she killed him," Coffin Ed said.

     
"I've thought of nothing else," Dennis confessed. "An' God be my secret judge, I just can't figure it out. He was the gentlest of persons. He was a baby. He never had a vicious thought. He liked to make people happy--"

     
"I'll bet."

     
"-- he wouldn't have attacked anyone, much less a woman or someone dressed like one."

     
"I thought he hated women."

     
"He liked women -- some women. He just liked me better."

     
"But they didn't like him, at least this one didn't."

     
"The only way I can figure it, it must have been a mistake," he said. "Either she mistook him for somebody else or she mistook something he was doing for something else."

     
"He wasn't doing nothing but walking down the street."

     
"Christ in heaven, why?" he exclaimed. "I've racked my brains."

     
"They fought about something."

     
"He wouldn't have stood up and fought her, he'd have run away if he could have."

     
"Maybe he couldn't."

     
"Yes, after I saw his body I understood. She must have run up behind him without him seeing her and cut him so deep it had crippled him."

     
Suddenly he clutched his face in his hands and his spongy boneless body heaved convulsively. "She's a monster!" he cried, tears streaming from beneath his hands. "An inhuman monster! She's worse than a blind rattlesnake! She's vile, that woman! Why don't you make her talk? Beat her up! Stomp on her!"

     
For the first time in memory, the detectives were embarrassed by the anguish of a witness in the pigeon's nest. Coffin Ed backed away as though from a distasteful worm. Automatically Grave Digger dimmed the battery of lights. But his neck had begun to swell from impotent rage.

     
"We can't get to her because Fats Little has got her covered."

     
"Fats Little?"

     
"That's right."

     
"What's his angle?"

     
"Who knows?"

     
"Fuck Fats," Coffin Ed said harshly. "Let's get back to you. How'd you learn he'd been killed? Someone phone you?"

     
"I read about it in the morning _News_," Dennis admitted. "About five o'clock this morning. You see, when John didn't come home I went by the lunch counter and found out he'd been taken by you people -- everyone knows you people, of course. I figured you people had taken him to the station here, so I came here and inquired at the desk but no one had seen you people. So then I went back to the lunch counter but no one had seen you people there either -- since you people had left with him. I couldn't imagine what you people wanted with him, but I figured he was safe."

     
"What did you think we wanted with him?"

     
"I figured you people was just looking around, looking into things--"

     
"What things?"

     
"I couldn't imagine."

     
"Then what'd you do?"

     
"I checked the Apollo bar and the record shop and places in the neighborhood."

     
"Sissy hangouts?"

     
"Well, if you want to call them that. Anyway, no one had seen you people, so I went home to wait. It wasn't till almost daybreak that it occurred to me that John might be hurt in an automobile accident or something. I was on my way back here --"

     
"You got a telephone, haven't you?"

     
"It's out of order."

     
"Then what?"

     
"I bought a morning News at the Eighth Avenue subway stop and it was in the late news flashes that someone named John Babson had been killed. After that I don't remember exactly what I did. I must have panicked. The next thing I remember was I was banging on the apartment door on St Nicholas Place where John's wife has a room, and his evil landlady calling through the door that she wasn't home. I don't know why I went there. I must of thought of having her go down and identify the body -- they were still legally married."

     
"Were you surprised to find her out at that hour?"

     
"No, it wasn't nothing unusual about her being out all night; it'd have been unusual for her to have been home. It was hard to trick in the room with the little girl there."

     
"Why didn't you go down and identify the body yourself?"

     
"I couldn't bear the thought of seeing him dead. I knew she wouldn't care, 'sides which we were giving her money."

     
"You knew the body had to be identified."

     
"I hadn't thought of it that way. I just wanted to be sure."

     
Then at noon he'd bought another newspaper and standing on the corner of 145th Street and Eighth Avenue -- he couldn't remember how he'd got there -- he had read where John's body had been identified by some Harlem building superintendent called Lucas Covey. This Covey man had claimed that John was the man called Jesus Baby who he had rented a room to -- the room where the white man was killed two nights ago -- three nights --

     
"And you recognized the name?"

     
"What name?"

     
"Covey."

     
"I don't know anyone called Lucas Covey and I've never heard the name before in my life."

     
"Did you call John 'Jesus Baby'?"

     
"Never in my life and I've never heard him called that by anyone. I've never even heard the name Jesus Baby. Jesus Baby and Lucas Covey and the rented room and all that, him being killed by someone named Pat Bowles -- I'd never heard of her either, and I'd never heard John speak of her, not to me anyway, and I don't believe he even knew her--I knew then it was a case of mistaken identity. Just a plain mistake that got him killed. She mistook him for somebody else. And then Lucas Covey saying he rented him the room where the white man was killed -- either another mistake on Covey's part or he was just plain lying. I was standing there on the sidewalk in the blazing sun and I blacked out. Life is so insecure one can get killed any moment through a mistake. And all the time when whatever it was was going on, he was home in bed."

     
"You'll testify to that under oath?"

     
"Testify under oath? I'll swear on a stack of Bibles nine feet high. There was no question about it, he couldn't have killed anyone that night -- unless it was me. I can account for every minute of his time. His body was touching my body every minute of that night."

     
"In bed?"

     
"Yes, all right, in bed, we were in bed together."

     
"You were lovers?"

     
"Yes, yes, yes, if you just got to make me say it. We were lovers, _lovers_ -- I've said it. We were man and wife, we were whatever you want to call us."

     
"Did his wife know all this?"

     
"Irene? She knew everything. She could have cleared his name of all those charges, murdering a white man and calling himself Jesus Baby. She came by the house that night and found us in bed. And she sat on the edge of the bed and said she wanted to see us make love."

     
"Did you?"

     
"No, we're not -- weren't -- exhibitionists. I told her if she wanted to watch someone make love, she could fix up a mirror so she could watch herself."

     
"Did you find her?"

     
"Find her?"

     
"Today."

     
"Oh, no. She hadn't come home last time I was by there; her landlady is taking care of her little girl. So I had to go down and look at John's body by myself. That's when I knew for sure the killing had been a case of mistaken identity -- when I saw the way he'd been cut. He'd been hamstrung from the back so he couldn't have run and that was the end. The only one who can prove this is the -- the person who cut him --"

     
"We can't get to her."

     
"That's what you told me. You can't get to see her and I had a lot of trouble getting into the morgue t& see his body when I'm -- was -- his only friend. That's the way it is when you're poor. The police didn't believe nothing I said -- they brought me back here and I been held in solitary ever since. But I can prove every word I said."

     
"How?"

     
"Well, anyway along with his wife. If she'll talk. They'll have to believe her -- legally she's his wife. And then legally she'll have to claim his body, although I'll pay for the funeral and everything myself."

     
"What about your own wife -- if you've got a wife? How does she feel about your love life?"

     
"My wife? I put her down before I came to the World. She ain't no help. It's John's wife you need."

     
"All right, we'll look up John's wife," Grave Digger said, writing down the address of Irene Babson on St Nicholas Place. "And we'll have you confront Lucas Covey too."

     
"I'll go with you."

     
"No, we'll leave you here and bring him to you."

     
"I want to go with you."

     
"No, you're safer here. We don't want to lose you too, through a mistake."

                       
_______________

Interlude

     
The word "LOVE" was scrawled on the door in dark paint.

     
The room smelled of cordite.

     
The body lay face down on the carpeted floor, at right angles with the bed from which it had fallen.

     
"Too late," Grave Digger said.

     
"From some gun with love," Coffin Ed echoed.

     
It was the last thing they had expected. They were shocked.

     
Lucas Covey had left the world. But not of his own volition.

     
Someone had pressed the muzzle of a small caliber revolver against the flesh of his left temple and pulled the trigger. It had to have been a revolver. An automatic pistol would not have fired pressed against the flesh. The body had pitched forward to the floor. The killer had bent over and put a second bullet into the base of his skull, but from a greater distance, merely singeing the hair.

     
The TV set was playing. A mellifluous voice spoke of tights that never bagged. Coffin Ed stepped over and turned it off. Grave Digger opened the drawer of the night table and saw the .45 Colt automatic.

     
"Never had a chance to get at it."

     
"He didn't believe it," Coffin Ed sai4. Someone he knew and trusted stuck a pistol against his tempfr " looked into his eyes and blew out his brains."

     
Grave Digger nodded. "It figures. He thought they were joking."

     
"That could be said of half the victims in the world."

Interlude

     
And then the little orphan boy asked the question in all their minds, "But why? why? why?"

     
Solemnly he replied: "It was the God in me."

                       
_______________

20

     
Other than the caper with the big white sex freak involving a gang called "The Real Cool Moslems" and some teen-age colored girls -- including his own daughter, Sugartit -- Coffin Ed had had very few brushes with juvenile delinquency. The few young hoodlums with whom they had butted heads from time to time hadn't been representative of anyone -- but young hoodlums of any race. But this new generation of colored youth with its spaceage behavior was the quantity X to them.

     
What made them riot and
 
taunt the white police on one hand, and compose poetry and dreams complex enough to throw a Harvard intellectual on the other? All of it couldn't be blamed on broken opportunities, inequalities, poverty, discrimination -- or genius either. Most were from the slums that didn't breed genius and dreams, but then some were from good middle-class families that didn't suffer so severely from all the inequalities. And the good and the bad and the smart and the squares alike were a part of some kind of racial ferment: all of them members of the opposition. And there wasn't any damn need of talking about find the one man responsible: there wasn't any one man responsible.

     
He admitted his concern to Grave Digger as they rode to work.

     
"What's come over these young people, Digger, while we been chasing pappy thugs?"